We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?”Īnd that simple, human question makes Howard’s later inaction all the more shameful. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. We practised discrimination and exclusion. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. “It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. “And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians. I will quote only the most striking paragraphs of the whole, short speech, which is available in full here. It is, to my nations great shame, almost inconceivable that such a speech could be given by any Prime Minister today of either major party. Keating’s speech, in simple, active sentences, also proved to be so much better than Rudd’s Sorry Day speech in 2008. How different that attitude is to the one presented by our immediate previous Prime Minister in his Redfern Park Speech in 1992. As if it were not bad enough that the horror of the state actively and forcibly stealing children from indigenous families could have occurred in Australia – but that our government could then say, of something that was still occurring in the 1970s, that it was impossible to apologise for these actions as they belonged to a different time and circumstance must surely count as evil. Not only did this act of bastardy show the true colours of both Howard and too many of his parliamentary colleagues, but it shamed our entire nation and did much to diminish our apology when it finally (and inevitably) did come as the first act of the new government. If I was able to talk in terms of good and evil (if those words hadn’t been forever sullied in justifying endless wars directed at the innocent and defenceless) then as good an example of evil from recent Australian history would Prime Minister John Howard’s refusal to allow parliament to apologise for the stolen generations.

The History Wars by Stuart Macintyre